Sam Shepard Quotes
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Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.
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I'm not denying that it's exciting to have a play on Broadway.
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Guys like Clyde McPhatter used to sing their tail ends off!
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Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.
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More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest, oddly enough.
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Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.
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I never thought about having a daughter, and then I had a daughter, and it was a remarkable thing. It was very different from having a son and your response to it. With a son, it's much more complex. And it's probably because of my stuff in the past. With a daughter, I was surprised at how simple it is.
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I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.
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I have a cellphone, but I have no Google, I have no gaggle.
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I don't believe in a lot of schmoozing and buttering up. Not that you don't become friends in work. But I think it's a misconception that you have to do a lot of hanging before you work.
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I never considered myself a movie star, and I didn't want to become a movie star, because as soon as you do, you throw away that possibility of playing character. You really do. All of a sudden you're just an entity, you know?
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You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
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It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.
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Grief is bizarre territory because there's no predicting how long it'll take to get over certain things. You just don't know how long it's going to resound in your life.
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It's my private life, and it's not up for grabs.
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I'm a great believer in chaos. I don't believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula. Chaos is a much better instigator, because we live in chaos - we don't live in a rigorous form.
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I don't get offered leading parts. I suppose I've become a kind of character actor or sideman. I think it had to do with probably in the '90s, I refused so many leading roles that they gave up on me, or I just became unpopular, or I became old. All those reasons.
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When I first started in film, I was terrified of the camera.
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My dad was a kind of semiprofessional Dixieland-type drummer, and I learned the drums from him. When I was about twelve, we bought our first Ludwig drum set from a pawnshop - a marching-band bass drum, great big tom-toms, and big, deep snare drums.
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Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father.
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I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.
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I'm not put off so much by first-time directors if the script is great. If the script isn't there, I'm not there.
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I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.
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I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?